I wasn’t always aware of my Blackness. Nigeria has fewer white people than countries in the Eastern and Southern parts of Africa because the climate and diseases aren’t ideal for colonizers. So, lucky me, I never really had to experience microaggressions and racism as we see them today.
But how did I know I was Black, you ask? It certainly wasn’t just last week when the whole world seemed to have finally opened their eyes to what has been happening, and consciences were activated faster than classes filling up on registration day.
It was when I came to UBC.
It was when my classmates couldn’t seem to look me in the eye. It was when my usually charismatic personality couldn’t make friends with my stARTup orientation leaders and fellow participants. It was when my teacher stepped back when I approached him despite his obvious camaraderie with the white girls. It was when I tried to educate myself on Africa and realized I couldn’t even take African Studies as a major. As a minor, it’s underfunded, underrepresented, and barely holding on as it is. They say it’s because “nobody wants to take it”. Even if that racist generalization was somehow true, where else are we supposed to get correct information when our political science teachers are painfully biased and only teach one side of the story? These teachers never ask why Africa is the way it is and never ask what America or Britain were doing there in the first place—stealing its people, resources, and rigging elections for their own gain. Teachers use Western democracy and values as the ideal of academia but have never asked why colonized, randomly put together peoples with a vastly different ethnic makeup may need a new measure of civility? Who can tell you that Africans eat people but won’t tell you that the first wave of industrialization was powered by stolen African resources? Millions of them, woven into the very fibres of the Western world, put together on the backs of slaves. And yet here we are, still fighting, barely sixty years after colonization, 200 years of occupation and 400 years of slavery. It’s almost like nothing ever changed.
What, you may ask, does UBC have to do with this? How can their placating words and vague statements be so harmful that I am here taking the time to write this article? It’s a principle of the system, of course. Let’s talk about the things we can see: a minuscule population of Black students, embarrassingly few Black faculty who have to bear the overwhelming weight of being the sole supporters of said students, classrooms which function as a space rife with microaggressions, a steadfast reluctance to make African Studies a major, blindness to the struggle of Black student organizations who have to clamour for the same recognition as other clubs, a disproportionate amount of Black students hired into on-campus positions, and a president who thinks playing the cello makes any of this better. A president whose failure to recognize any of this by now is frankly insulting.
Will things change after this article is received? Heaven knows. Some of you are uncomfortable, some of you are tired of hearing about this. How tired do you think Black people are? Or do you not realize that all the things I listed above amount to more than just discomfort? That they send a message that we are unwelcome on this campus and signal other students, teachers, and institutions to treat us as such? That we are human beings as well with parents who’ve sacrificed so much just for us to receive less than the bare minimum?
All I can ask of anyone who reads this is that you de-center yourselves in this conversation. Sympathy and love aren’t enough. Action is. Your action and awareness could be the difference between not just acknowledging that Black lives matter but that they are worthy and always will be. On an institutional level, I encourage UBC to put its money where its mouth is. To invest in programs and systems that favour us so it’s no longer the luck of the draw. Whatever the case may be, I plan to hold UBC accountable—who’s with me?
